by Wesley Harris
Dining at the Igoe Inn near Ruston involved more than food—it was a performance.
The tiny café was no place for a quick meal. You couldn’t eat and run. Owner, chef, and storyteller Tom Igoe treated diners as his audience, and a hurried visit would have been an insult that missed the point entirely.
One writer described the Igoe Inn on U.S. Highway 80 as a place of “fabulous and intricately woven stories, poetry readings, seances, artistic debate, the best steaks in the world, and glamorous stars from the 1950s.”
When Interstate 20 was still on the drawing board, the Igoe Inn stood as a tiny oasis on the narrow two-lane thoroughfare connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific—the only coast-to-coast, all-weather highway in America.
In the 1950s, Igoe struck locals as not only unconventional but far from the mainstream of Ruston society, wearing his white hair long and dressing in clothes now associated with Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame.
A retired journalist who had worked for various Hearst newspapers—America’s largest newspaper chain at one time—Igoe knew celebrities, politicians, and international dignitaries.
Igoe came to Louisiana seeking to get into the oil and gas business. He met Annie Nobles, a Lincoln Parish native, who taught at Fair Park High School in Shreveport. They married and Annie stayed in Shreveport on school days and came home to Ruston on the weekends.
Whatever ambitions Igoe once had in oil and gas faded quickly. Instead, he opened a small café on U.S. 80. And since Highway 80 was the major highway crossing the country prior to the Interstate system, many of those high-profile acquaintances would stop at his tiny café.
Igoe served not only as sole proprietor but as the only employee. He opened the doors on a semi-regular basis for dinner at his convenience or after hours when he knew celebrities would be stopping by. When stars like Tyrone Power or Bette Davis visited, it became an event, not just a meal.
One patron, remembering the experience told a reporter in 1985 that Igoe “loved to talk. He’d sit right down with you and tell these fascinating stories. You’d be there for a while if you ate at the Igoe Inn.”
Tom “Butch” Aswell, a Louisiana Tech student when he knew Igoe, remembered him as “an intellectual, sort of the predecessor to the anti-war protesters” who came later. Igoe loved his politics but stuck mostly to writing letters and articles rather than actively campaigning for his candidates in the field.
Igoe fed and entertained a host of politicians, international travelers, college students and faculty, and of course those Rustonites who weren’t too sensitive to be put off by his idiosyncratic demeanor. He fed opera singer Beverly Sills, big band leader Fred Waring, and even Elvis when the “Memphis Flash” was performing nearly weekly down the road at the Louisiana Hayride.
Seances were rumored to occur late at night at the Igoe Inn, and fragments of odd beatnik poetry occasionally drifted through the tiny building. Wiley Hilburn, a local newspaper reporter who knew Igoe, said the restaurateur confessed to having a spiritual guide he called “Red Pony.” In recounting a traffic crash to Hilburn, Igoe blamed it on Red Pony falling asleep in the back seat instead of watching out for him.
L.V.E. Irvine, founder of the Louisiana Tech Concert Series, became friends with Igoe, an avid connoisseur of the arts. Irvine once heard a radio interview in New York with musician Fred Waring. “Somehow the conversation got around to food, and old Fred said, ‘Yeah, I sure would like to be in Ruston, Louisiana, at the Igoe Inn,’” Irvine recalled for a newspaper story.
In 1961, Tom Igoe died of natural causes. A memorial service was held in Ruston, but his body was cremated in Dallas. For some time, the ashes went unclaimed. No one knows whether one of his three sons or one daughter—or anyone at all—ever claimed them. Annie had died in 1955 and is buried with her family at Salem Cemetery on Highway 151 between Dubach and Arcadia.
I remember the abandoned café from my youth in the seventies. Sitting just off the U.S. 80 right-of-way, the miniature white building surrendered to the vines and decay overtaking it. Today, the vines are so thick, I’m not sure anything remains behind them.
Highway 80 itself is now a memory, no longer carrying celebrities, business travelers, and vacationers across the country since Interstate 20 was completed—an act that likely would have ended Tom Igoe’s personal fiefdom had he lived that long. The road beside it is now Igoe Inn Road, the only remnant of the local phenomenon that was Tom C. Igoe.
